A failed bomb plot revives terrorism fears

What happened

Capping a rapid-fire investigation, authorities this week captured a would-be terrorist, 53 hours after he allegedly attempted to detonate a makeshift bomb in an SUV parked in New York City’s bustling Times Square. Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old American citizen born in Pakistan, was arrested as he sat aboard an Emirates airlines jet poised to depart for Dubai from New York’s Kennedy Airport. “I was expecting you,” he told Homeland Security agents who boarded the plane to detain him. That same day, Shahzad had paid cash for the ticket to Dubai, after being placed hours earlier on the State Department’s no-fly list. Authorities who were trailing Shahzad lost track of him for several hours as he waited at Kennedy, picking up his trail again only after finding his name on a passenger manifest. By that time, he was already aboard the Emirates plane. “It’s fair to say there was a breakdown there,” an FBI official said.

The bomb, crudely fashioned from propane tanks, gasoline, non-explosive fertilizer, and consumer-grade firecrackers, failed to ignite. But it started a small fire inside the SUV, producing smoke that caught the attention of a street vendor, who alerted police. They rapidly cleared the area, which was thronged with pedestrians enjoying a balmy Saturday evening. “It is clear this was a terrorist plot aimed at murdering Americans in one of the busiest places in our country,” said Attorney General Eric Holder. Shahzad reportedly told investigators he had acted alone, to avenge U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, but also said he had received bomb-making training last year in the Taliban stronghold of that country’s Waziristan region. Pakistani authorities arrested at least four of his alleged associates outside Karachi.

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What the editorials said

We should take no comfort from the possibility that Shahzad acted alone, said the New York Daily News. Osama bin Laden may not have planned the Times Square attack, but his perverted version of Islam has clearly inspired followers who are “dispersed, independent, and united only by bloodthirsty zeal.” These “atomized individuals” are behind “more than two dozen homegrown terrorism conspiracies” in recent years, some of which, such as the Fort Hood massacre, were more successful than Shahzad’s.

We were lucky this time, said The Wall Street Journal, but we need more than luck to protect us. This near-calamity is a reminder that we must “continue to play offense against terrorists” with every means at our disposal. Yet the Obama administration is treating Shahzad not as an enemy combatant but as an ordinary criminal, reading him his Miranda rights and allowing him to “lawyer up.” If his fellow terrorists knew he was “being subjected to more thorough interrogation as an enemy combatant,” they might think twice about attacking us.

What the columnists said

Actually, Shahzad’s arrest shows the wisdom of the Obama administration’s anti-terrorism policy, said Fred Kaplan in Slate.com. Dick Cheney and his fellow hard-liners insist terrorism can be combated only if we operate on a permanent war footing. But this administration wisely treats terrorist plots as a law-enforcement matter that can be “pre-empted, foiled, and punished by the routine procedures of a well-trained police force and intelligence organizations.” Our cops, courts, and laws function quite well, and need not be thrown into the wastebasket to stop terrorism.

Terror groups may no longer be able to pull off a monstrous 9/11-type attack, said Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson in The Washington Post. But the Times Square plot is extremely troubling in its own right, since it suggests that a new terror front has been opened—one in which improvised explosive devices of the sort used in Iraq and Afghanistan will be deployed in American cities. “A sustained urban terrorism campaign could disrupt American society as profoundly as the Sept. 11 attacks—if not more so.”

Let’s not “overstate the capabilities of terrorists,” said Jonathan Chait in The New Republic. The media tends to portray them as “diabolically brilliant villains,” but most of them “are basically dolts.” Shahzad used non-explosive fertilizer in making his bomb. Fortunately for us, it’s still very hard to find people “who are both sociopathic mass murderers and capable of carrying out a complex, technically challenging plot.”